Edwin Horatio Harrison

Edwin Horatio Harrison (1844-1873) was an English immigrant tragedian and comedian who travelled the American West as part of Liam Keane's travelling show during the 1870s. Keane discovered him motherless and without arms or legs, so he decided to recruit him into his travelling show and teach him to theatrically recite the poem "Ozymandias", the biblical story of Cain and Abel, works by Shakespeare (especially Sonnet 29), and Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address. Sadly, by 1873, Harrison's popularity was declining as the act reached smaller towns with less interest in the classics, and Harrison ultimately decided to purchase the theatrical chicken Gallus Mathematicus when he saw that its mathematical abilities were more popular than Harrison's prose. Keane then took the show wagon to a riverside and threw Harrison to his death into the icy river below, having seen Harrison as an unproductive mouth to feed.